Presque vu LXVII

Bud Parr has several reasons why we should boycott Amazon: “Unless I see something from Amazon proving that this is somehow justified (using strong-arm tactics to push up publishers’ discounts) I hereby boycott Amazon.com and suggest you do too.”

*

The tiny community of Harrold, in the far north of Texas, has recently approved a local decision to allow it’s teachers to bring firearms to school to protect against possible shootings.

*

An American book prize has blacklisted Random House following its “cowardly self-censorship” of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina, which is about the child-bride of Muhammad. A spokesman for the prize said Random House’s decision not to print Jones’s novel represented “a threat to all literature”.

Barcelona was, for many of us Olympic virgins, as much about sex as it was about sport. There were the gorgeous hostesses – there to assist the athletes – in their bright yellow shirts and black skirts; there were the indigenous lovelies who came to watch the competitions. And then there were the female athletes – literally thousands of them – strutting, shimmying, sashaying and jogging around the village, clad in Lycra and exposing yard upon yard of shiny, toned, rippling and unimaginably exotic flesh. Women from all the countries of the world: muscular, virile, athletic and oozing oestrogen. I spent so much time in a state of lust that I could have passed out. Indeed, for all I knew I did pass out – in a place like that how was one to tell the difference between dreamland and reality?